“My second question is, if meaning-making of the recorded texts is the actual intended reason for their recording, would reading the texts with such an interpretive frame bring one to the Trinity doctrine by default? Bishop John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan arrived at the exact opposite destination! And the Apostolic and Apologetic Fathers were more Arian than Chalcedonian to be sure.”
As I indicated in response to your first question, Jaco, I am not at all surprised that we do not find an explicit confession of the divinity of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Mark. I do not want to commit myself to the theory, popular in my day, that low christologies dominated in the early days of the Church and only evolved decades later into the high christologies we hold dear. The works of Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, and others have powerfully challenged this thesis. But however the historians may finally land on this, we need to recognize that the move to the Nicene confession of the divinity of Christ required a dramatic reconstruction of divinity as understood by both Judaism and paganism. Neither provided the philosophical categories to accommodate what Christians believed and felt they needed to say about the One God and his Son Jesus Christ. Old categories needed to be broken and remade; new categories needed to be invented (see John Behr, The Way to Nicaea). Three centuries of theological trial and error passed. In the meantime Christians just kept worshipping the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, acclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and baptizing converts in the triadic Name.
The decisive breakthrough occurred in the fourth century with the Nicene-Constantinopolitan confession of the homoousion. Many nowadays like to argue that the Nicene confession that Jesus Christ is eternally begotten of the substance of the Father represents an alien imposition of Hellenistic philosophy upon the faith of the Church. Just the opposite is the case. I suggest that we should we should see the revolution ignited by the Council of Nicaea (325) and dogmatically finalized by the Council of Constantinople (381), embodied in the important trinitarian reflections of St Athanasius and the Cappadocians, as akin to the paradigm-shift inaugurated in physics by Albert Einstein. Einstein advanced a model that could better accommodate and explain the data with which all physicists had to grapple. Similarly, the Nicene Fathers advanced a paradigm that could better accommodate and explain the data of Scripture and Christian experience. Or as Thomas Torrance put it, the Church finally figured out how to put all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together:
In the Nicene formulation of the homoousion something absolutely fundamental took place in the mind of the early Church. It was a decisive step in deeper understanding of the Gospel, taken in the continuity of the apostolic tradition, upon which the Church, in obedience to God’s saving revelation in Jesus Christ, could not go back. It was an irreversible event in the history of Christian theology. The significance of what happened may be indicated by reference to what we do with a jig-saw puzzle. We assemble the scattered pieces together, fitting them appropriately to each other until the pattern they conjointly make comes to view. If we then break it all up and throw the pieces back into disorder, we may have little difficulty in fitting them all together again, but it will be impossible for us to do that without recalling the picture we reached the first time. Something irreversible would have taken place in our mind and memory, which could not but influence all subsequent attempts to recover the coherent pattern made by the different pieces.
An ineraseable event of that kind happened in the mind and memory of the Church at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. It was a turning-point of far-reaching significance, with conceptual irreversibility. When the conception of the oneness in being between the incarnate Son and the Father was formed and given explicit expression in the clause όμοούσιοϛ τω Πάτρι, a giant step forward was taken in grasping the inner ontological coherence of the Gospel as it had been mediated through the apostolic Scriptures. Once that insight had been reached, the Church could not go back upon it, because the evangelical substance of the faith, with its distinctively Christian doctrine of God, had been secured in its mind and understanding in a permanent way. ‘The Word of God which came through the Ecumenical Synod at Nicaea abides for ever’ [Athanasius]. (The Trinitarian Faith, pp. 144-145)
Folk like Spong, Borg, and Crossan (and, I’m afraid to say, Tuggy) are like old Newtonian scientists who insist they do not need the theories of Einstein. No wonder they can’t find the Theanthropos in the Holy Scriptures.
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
Torrance for the win 🙂
LikeLike
Pingback: Mark, evangelicals, and catholics | Trinities
Part of the reason that some think low christologies were the order of the day in the early church is that it has generally been believed that early Christian thinkers such as Origen were subordinationist in their thinking. Ilaria Ramelli, quite vociferously and, I believe, successfully challenges that view. She argues that Origen is really the father of nicene orthodoxy. Apart from any study of Origen’s works, Ramelli’s thesis has the ring of truth to it, especially when we consider that it was precisely those stalwarts of nicene orthodoxy, i.e., Sts. Athanasius, Basil, and the two Gregories who were among the most avid followers of Origen. For anyone who can read Italian, an excellent essay on this topic by Ramelli can be found at the following link:
http://mondodomani.org/teologia/ramelli2011.htm
Ed
LikeLike
Darn, my Italian is so darn rusty … 😛 But the Google translation allows one to get the gist of Ramelli’s argument. Very interesting! Thanks, Ed, for bringing this to our attention.
LikeLike
The problem with the formulation you quote here is how complicated it is. I doubt that Jesus and his earliest followers had in mind any complicated formulations about essences and the like. Trinitarianism relies on paradoxes and concepts that one needs a PhD to comprehend.
Nope, what is simpler and more likely to be true is that Jesus was a prophet who was thought to be a representative of God, as other prophets before him. His followers worshipped God through him, which meant he was exalted but not to any extraordinary status in terms of Jewish thought. As the Jesus movement split from Judiasm post-70 AD, the need to differentiate became paramount. It’s not all that complicated from a historical perspective and it doesn’t require us to read later theological concepts back into writings that had no such ideas.
LikeLike
Thank you, Therp, for your comment. You write:
How do you know what Jesus thinks about the Nicene homoousion? Surely you and I can agree that he intended his message to go out into the Hellenistic world. Once that happened it would have been the most natural thing for all those Hellenists to ask questions like “What is this One God whom you declare to be the creator of the universe?” “What is the relationship of this Jesus whom you proclaim as Savior and Lord to this One God?” etc. Surely the Church could not simply dismiss these questions, and as soon as it began to address them, it found itself knee deep in philosophical categories and reflection. It was unavoidable, just as it is unavoidable for us today.
Does one need a PhD to understand the doctrine of the Trinity? Heck no. That might be true for abstruse elaborations of the doctrine, such as we might find in Thomas Aquinas or Richard Swinburne; but it is most certainly not the case for the patristic doctrine. The key, I suggest, is to understand the dogma as grammatical rule. We find this rule repeatedly stated in the writings of St Athanasius:
In other words, whatever divine properties you attribute to the Father you may attribute to Jesus the Son, except Fatherhood; and whatever divine properties you attribute to the Son you may attribute to the Father, except Sonship. The Fathers weren’t interested in locking down a specific understanding of essence or substance or personhood. They were interested in the right and proper proclamation of the identity of God, though.
I’m not sure why you think that “simpler” is better. There’s plenty of evidence in the New Testament itself that suggests that the idea that Jesus was just a prophet or just a Messiah or whatever was inadequate to the apostolic understanding of our Lord’s identity. If God had wanted us to simply regard him as you have proposed, he would not have given us the Gospel of John or the Epistles of Paul.
LikeLike
Hi. I used to be an Arian heretic (as in, a REAL heretic and not just a mistaken heretic). That was when I first questioned the Trinity based on sola scriptura. I am working on a B.A. in religious studies, a B.A. in history, and might also try going after a minor or at least a minor equivalent in philosophy as well. As in, no Ph.D. yet. And trust me, I’ve understood the Trinity better than my professors (one mistook it for modalism and another mistook it for Tritheism).
LikeLike
“Nope, what is simpler and more likely to be true is that Jesus was a prophet who was thought to be a representative of God, as other prophets before him.”
The only problem with the above statement is that it is quite clear from very early on, i.e., while Christianity was still primarily a Jewish phenomenon, that Jesus was not simply like any other prophet. The Gospel of John states that “He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” Clearly, the early Christians believed that the one who took on human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, had an eternal pre-existence with God. You certainly can’t say that of any of the other prophets. Now it was simply a matter of determining whether this Word who became flesh fit into some sort of subordinationist scheme of emanations from the Father or whether, as the Church came to explicitly acknowledge, He was the eternally begotten Son of the Father, the same as Him except for Fatherhood. Given that the Church had always worshipped the Son in her liturgies (and this was true for the Arian heretics as much as it was for the orthodox), subordinationist theories were out of the question. The Church’s faith in her worship was clear. Jesus is God. All that was needed was a good theological articulation of that belief.
Ed
LikeLike
“finally figured out how to put all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together”
Sigh. This is so untrue to the history. There was little sense of relief, or discovery really, right after 325. The new terminology in fact brought much confusion, strife, and grief. Its meaning and importance were much debated. Demagoging polemics and scheming all around, with both sides trying to enlist the emperors, and not a few cases of bribery and violence. The homoousious claim wasn’t really asserted by the bishops, in the sense now understood, until the 381 council, which retroactively asserted the 325 one as decisive and binding, erasing many intervening councils and synods. Yes, the Cappadocians won. Theodosius then proceeded to smash all opposition. The details are quite depressing. Let’s not ignore all these facts and imagine a happy meeting of scholars, carefully working out the logical implications of scripture, and all going out for a beer to celebrate the happy results. We’re all *still* arguing about how “homoousios” should be understood, and about whether we should try to understand it at all! Well, some of us are. Many Christians merrily ignore it, and others simply celebrate it.
OK, I’m lecturing like the crank I am. But my point is: paradigm shift implies a breakthrough of understanding, which people in a big, rather sudden wave see as such. That is not what happened here.
LikeLike
Dale, I will admit that it’s always helpful to have an Emperor on the side of one’s paradigm shift. 😉 And you will notice that I do not claim that Nicaea magically effected an overnight revolution. (I have read Lewis Ayres and even a little Hanson.) So I think I covered my academic bases.
But the assertion of the homoousion, as interpreted by Athanasius, coupled with the Cappadocian distinction between ousia and hypostasis, did in fact effect establish in the life of the Church a paradigmatic lens through which the Church has read Scripture and proclaimed the gospel ever since. In the memory of the Church, Athanasius and the Cappadocians are especially venerated for their distinctive contributions to the development of the trinitarian dogma. Did they convince all of their 4th century peers? No, of course not. But as Max Planck quipped (to continue the analogy with scientific revolutions), “Science advances funeral by funeral.”
The fact that catholic theologians still argue about the precise meaning of the homoousion does not alter its dogmatic and ecumenical status. To go back on Nicaea (or if you prefer, Nicaea and 1 Constantinople) is simply unthinkable, as Torrance rightly states, even though it appears to be thinkable for some in Protestantism and evangelicalism.
LikeLike
Pingback: The Word made Flesh | All Along the Watchtower